For thousands of years, man has found it necessary to keep secrets. But for most of history, the art of keeping secrets developed slowly. The Caesar shift cipher, supposedly used by Julius Caesar himself, involved taking a letter and shifting it forward through the alphabet, to hide the message. Thus, “A” became “D”, “B” became “E”, and so on. Although generally considered a very weak encryption, there were few better encryption algorithms developed until centuries later.
Encryption became a focus of intense research during the two World Wars. Much effort was expended, both in developing codes that the enemy could not break, and in learning how to read the enemy's encrypted mail. Mechanical devices were designed to aid in encryption. One of the most famous of these machines is the German Enigma machine, although Enigma was by no means the only mechanical encryption machine of the era.
The advent of the computer has greatly altered the landscape for the use of encryption. No longer requiring complex machines or hours of manual labor, computers can encrypt and decrypt messages at high speed and for trivial cost. The understanding of the mathematics underlying computers has also introduced new encryption algorithms. The work of Diffie and Hellman led to a way to exchange private keys using exponential arithmetic modulo primes, and relies on the fact that calculating the shared key given the public information is computationally infeasible. And the popular RSA algorithm (named after its inventors: R. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman) relies on the fact that factoring large numbers is also computationally infeasible to decrypt encrypted data. The work of Diffie and Hellman, and the RSA algorithm, can theoretically be cracked, but cracking these algorithms would depend on solving mathematical problems that have yet to be solved. (As an aside, the RSA algorithm was also one of the first public-key cryptosystems, using a different key to decrypt than the key used to encrypt. This made it possible to publicly distribute one key without losing security.)
But no encryption algorithm has an infinite life span. For example, DES (the Data Encryption Standard) was originally released in 1976. The government originally estimated its useful life at 10 years. DES has lasted much longer than the original estimated life span, but because of its relatively short key, DES is considered less than ideal. DES has since been replaced by AES (the Advanced Encryption Standard) as the government standard, but DES remains in widespread use. Various improvements to DES exist, but these improvements cannot make DES secure forever. Eventually, DES will generally be considered insecure.
A need remains for a way to enhance the security of existing encryption algorithms.